THE NEW YORKER going back would be good for him. He and Mindy were shar- ing rides to classes-over the last month, the two of them had split up and had gotten back together "I'm glad you guys patched it up," Ralph told her. "Everybody thinks it's O.K. to just talk about us," Mindy an- ------ d " I ' l ' k ' nounce. t s 1 e we re soap- h " opera c aracters. "You said it," Paula told her. "He apologized, O.K.? He always apologizes. He always says he's a terrible person and I shouldn't have anything to do with him, but he really likes me, so that's supposed to make every- thing O. Ko" "Well, he's a nice guy," Ralph said. "You know what it's like?" Mindy said. "It's like that song they play on the oldies stations- 'Don't know much about history, don't know much biology.' The singer says he doesn't know this and he doesn't know that, he can't do this and he can't do that, he's a complete loser. But then he says, 'I love you,' and the girl is supposed to fall into his arms. That's the stupidest song anybody ever wrote. Who'd fall in love with a guy like that?" Lacroix had joined them by this time. He wore a red wool shirt that was sun-bleached pink in places. Grin- ning, he put his arm around Mindy, who threw it off. "Not only that, I'm unemployed," he said. "How about a k . ?" ISS. "You're not unemployed," Ralph growled. "Jesus Christ. You're the only one still on the payroll, and you keep telling everyone you're unem- ployed." " s " L . O d orry, acrOIX sal . " Th k ' 0 ose wor men s-comp premIums are expensive. Give me some credit." When they had finished their pizzas and were saying goodbye in the park- ing lot, Laura Grobak told Ralph, "QualiTex is the sort of company that does O.K. in a recession. Their stuff goes for repairs and maintenance. You guys are in trouble, but what do you expect? Construction always gets mur- dered. But you should see the bank. They've got nobody to blame but them- selves. You should see the commercial loans they made. If a chimpanzee ? 1----7 --::> - ---; -::::; 41 ? ---- -- -::: - c-- ><--p / '" --c> - -- é..-r- .---' < \ " -I " - ;' x , II\ " ----. /;?/ / - '--j--ý L /- - / , c--/ Æ_ è !1-'7/ / / % ;;/ r) / ,/' J , ( I , :/ _ê' /[ ( - _ -_ - _ --l Y , ....=-..n:---/7 .... -:......_ .-- .. c::;-___ <.... '- - - , \. <: - \../' /' "When it comes to loving someone) I never seem to get it right.)) . came in they would have given him a million bucks." Ralph started laughing "I must be pretty bad," he told her. "They turned me down last spring." " I 0 d ' d d o" L Just on t un erstan It, aura said. "I mean, the Inter Bay guys are stupid. I can accept that. Fine. But look at New Y or k. New Yor k bankers are supposed to be smart, right? They made loans to Third World countries and got murdered. They made loans during the energy crisis and got mur- dered. They got into the leveraged- buyout business and got murdered. Now it's real estate. They lent money to Donald Trump. Would you lend money to Donald Trump?'" "Your wife thinks I'm worse than a chimpanzee," Ralph told Grobak. "She's been talking about Donald Trump in her sleep," Grobak said. "I wake up in the middle of the night and she's yelling, 'Would you lend money to Donald Trump?'" B y mid-December, Lacroix was dead. He was killed when his pickup truck and a Tonio's Pizza de- livery car crashed into each other on Route 147, in Middlefield, about two in the morning. Police weren't sure who had strayed into whose lane. They said the other driver, also killed, was off duty and was on his way home from a Christmas party. Blood tests . indicated that he had been slightly drunker than Lacroix. The impact threw the Tonio's sign from the roof of the car fifty feet into the woods. The shock and disorientation caused by the accident were made somehow more acute for Lacroix's family and friends by the fact that his death had had nothing to do with his leg. That seemed bizarre and unfair-as if Lacroix had been looking in one di- rection and had been flattened from another. The swelling in his shin had gotten much worse the preceding week, and he had been hospitalized briefly, and his doctors had scheduled explor- atory surgery. "What the hell's gOIng on?" Ralph bellowed after getting the news on the phone from Ramsey. "If some guy has cancer does he get blown up in a plane crash?" He couldn't get over it. "When I used to tell these guys they'd be in prison or worse if it wasn't for me, I didn't mean him," he said as he got ready on the morning of the funeral, and Paula looked around to make sure Mindy was out of earshot. Mindy had broken up with Lacroix again, appar- ently permanently, in early November. But she was very upset and had spent the last two nights with Ralph and Paula. She ended up staying with them for a week. "You better calm down about this,